


bring me home

by bbakagou



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU - Canon Divergence, Angst, Death Eater Sirius Black, First War with Voldemort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I'm astounded by my level of unoriginality, James Potter-centric, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, POV James Potter, Post-Hogwarts, Sirius Black & James Potter Friendship, not exactly but yes exactly, why does that tag not exist what
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:21:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23709091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbakagou/pseuds/bbakagou
Summary: James knows the consequences of doing what he does, but Sirius Black was never supposed to be one of them.
Relationships: Remus Lupin/Sirius Black (implied), Sirius Black & James Potter, Sirius Black & Marlene McKinnon
Comments: 8
Kudos: 82





	bring me home

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [i loved and i loved (and i lost you)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22120126) by [saudadeonly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saudadeonly/pseuds/saudadeonly). 



**bring me home;**

**/**

The flash of blue bleeds easily into a brilliant crimson staining his hands. Pale cerulean flakes off at his fingertips, porcelain innocence shattered across his skin by the blood dancing down his shoulders. It's bright, too goddamn bright for this time of year, for winter, and he briefly remembers a short blue skirt tight around the edges and flowing at the ends like the dazed fluttering of a butterfly's wings, but then it disappears and all that's left is him choking on his own words. 

There's the distant sound of a lighter and he faintly recognizes the bitter scent of half-smoked cigarettes that’s always been reserved only for Sirius.

The world sobs into a shell-swirled tragedy that he once saw a painting of, collapses into bricks and stones, and he remembers talking about how death would be sexy, hot, how it would be smoking and drinking and enjoying everything else that fell in between dying and thriving.

He never thought that death would be him, not even once, but he’s standing in an empty field of memories, arms shackled with blood, crimson with all the mistakes he’s made, and when he looks into empty grey eyes he wonders when, exactly, everything went so wrong.

(There's this nagging thought in the back of his mind that says it was right around the time he met Sirius Black, but he pushes it away.)

-

Sirius will always be an open-mouthed wound on his heart, will always be bleeding through the stitches and aching and throbbing. He’s learned a long time ago how to minimize the pain until it’s not all he can think about. He’s also learned to let the disappointment wash over him once in a while, let it bite him to shattered fragments on the ground, so that he’s not in complete denial.

James hasn’t seen Sirius in years, not since a few months after their last year at Hogwarts. He misses him with bone-deep awareness. Remus isn’t doing much better—most nights he’s two bottles of Firewhisky on the wrong side of drunk and James doesn’t say anything because he can never miss Sirius in the way that Remus does—and Peter’s hardly around anymore, and Lily says he at least should _consider_ the possibility that he’s not coming back.

And he has. He’s had nightmares where Sirius is laying on the ground somewhere cold and lonely, choking on a pool of murder at his feet, and he’s had dreams—hazy illuminations of springtime memories—where Sirius’s laughter tastes like triumph and a bundle of static electricity, where he’s as alive as Renaissance angels and his eyes aren’t made up of layers of lies, and incandescence shines off him like it always has.

Every time, he wakes up and forgets how he’s ever managed to fall asleep.

-

Being reunited with Sirius is supposed to be a memorable moment, supposed to be full of laughter and joy and fucking rainbows or _whatever_ , but it isn’t supposed to be like _this._

It was a simple mission, really—a simple objective. Get McKinnon to headquarters before her house gets blown up by Death Eaters. Easy—really easy—except that it’s Sirius Black who glares at him from where Marlene disappears with a sudden crackle of magic energy, and James’s world collapses into itself just a little bit more.

“Sirius?” he asks, and his voice has cracks all over it, splinters, and he prays to all the gods he somewhat believes in that this is a dream.

“Hello, Jamie,” he says, chin tilted upwards in that annoying aristocratic way of his, and he smiles. “It’s really been a while, hasn’t it?”

James feels his heart shiver in his chest cavity, feels vasoconstriction at a whole new level when blood stops flowing to his legs. Seeing Sirius again—it feels like trying to crawl through the gap between his teeth, feels like he’s being torn apart limb from limb and biting into the endless regret in his head.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he manages.

Sirius shrugs, kicks at the dust under his shoes. “I thought that’d be quite obvious, James,” he says with thinly veiled impatience. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to—”

“No!” James yelps with absolutely no coherent thought behind it.

Sirius raises an eyebrow and asks, _“No?”_

“I’m not letting you go,” James says fiercely, looking at the man in front of him and trying with breathless desperation to see the Sirius he knows _._ “I’m not letting you just leave and disappear again.”

Vague guilt shimmers in Sirius’s eyes but it’s snuffed out quickly like a wisp of smoke. He stares at James for a long moment before he snorts quietly. “You’re about two times as Gryffindor as you look,” he says. His eyes are sharp and cold, but a tiny, almost imperceptible smile crosses his face. “Try to stay out of trouble for me, will you?”

And before James can even pout at him angrily, before he can fall back into the uniform the two of them had worn for so long, Sirius brandishes his wand and Apparates away.

It’s night-time, the trace of something other than magic and sin in the air; raw emotion, a dying spark of hope, a shivering heartbeat, little white lies and a hollow smile; empty words and a different sort of resignation. He wonders, briefly, where he went so wrong because he knows Sirius. He _knows_ him, and he knows himself, but his tears still come out as confessions—or maybe his confessions come out as tears, he can’t tell—and his cries are still full of broken promises.

He goes home and Lily says he looks like he’s seen a ghost and he laughs because he has, hasn’t he? He has, he has, he has.

-

October shuts her eyes at him and November chokes him out of his own mind.

-

Snow falls on James’s glasses and he takes them off to clean them for, approximately, the tenth time today. Patrolling random spots in Muggle neighborhoods is not really his idea of a cozy weekend, but Moody had said there’d been talk about a raid, and orders are orders. Or whatever.

“Is this even necessary?” James asks. “I mean, I could be at home having breakfast with my lovely wife, and you could be at a pub drinking yourself half-dead, but no—we’re hanging out in a shady street in London waiting for an attack that, frankly, probably won’t happen.”

Remus looks at him flatly. “I know, James,” he says. “You’ve said this before. About twenty-three times.”

James pouts miserably. “It’s freezing too,” he adds, then frowns. “Though I don’t suppose werewolves get cold much, do they?”

Remus rolls his eyes in the exasperated way that he always does whenever James talks about his lycanthropy. “I do get cold,” he disagrees. “Just not as easily as you do. Nobody gets cold as easily as you do, James, not even—”

He cuts himself off, eyes dulling down to near-black emptiness, but James can take an educated guess at what he’d been about to say, and his face falls like the fishhooks holding up his smile have been yanked away.

“I miss him,” Remus says and kicks at the snow. “I loved him and I lost him and I miss him so damn much that I can hardly breathe.”

James gets it. He spends his nights clawing at memories like they’re all that he has. _He gets it._

-

When McKinnon talks about Sirius, her entire face glows with broken-bone reflections of the way things used to be.

Lily doesn’t understand. Nobody except Remus and Marlene really do. Sirius is— _was—_ an intrinsic part of their lives. James is sure that Remus will never love anyone the way that he loves Sirius, and he’s also sure that Dorcas will cut herself into tiny puzzle pieces trying to replace what Sirius had been to Marlene.

James licks his lips and shatters into a million particles of incendiary light.

-

“Go away, Jamie, or I’ll curse you.”

“I’m like a clingy cat—I tend to come back even when I’m kicked away. _Especially_ when I’m kicked away.”

A pause. The flick of a lighter and the familiar smell of Marlboro desktop favorites. “I told you to stay out of trouble,” Sirius says. “This isn’t that. I could kill you, y’know.”

“You can’t.”

Sirius hums. “Can’t I?”

James shrugs. “I don’t think you’re capable of ever hurting me, much less killing me,” he says, grabs the cigarette from between Sirius’s fingers, and takes a hit. Smoke dances out of his nose as he tries not to let his hands shake.

Sirius blinks, surprised by his confidence, then he laughs. It sounds unpracticed, like he hasn’t done that in a long time and he’s almost forgotten how to, but that’s okay because Sirius _laughs._

James tilts his head. Sirius sighs heavily, like he’s tired and worn out and so very done with everything, and when he whispers out a small, “You’re right,” James counts it as a win.

-

(In December 1980, Sirius calls him Prongs for the first time in months, and the absolute hell that James has been living in for at least twice that long freezes over just a little.)

-

January turns into a burning sulfuric wish that things were different.

Sirius holds a wand to James’s throat as Evan Rosier throws a Cruciatus at Lily, and she screams like her heart’s being choked out of her mouth, and McKinnon, who’s been knocked out five times too many, doesn’t even have the mental capacity to register what’s happening and stares at the ground like it’s the most interesting thing in the world.

Lestrange—James can’t tell which of them it is, but he thinks it might be Rabastan—laughs with all the excitement of a teenage girl on her birthday and sends curses toward anyone he can see. The air smells like copper from all the blood on the floor. Greyback—and if James ever sees the bastard again, he’s absolutely going to kill him—stares at a passed-out Remus like he’s a trophy, a prize, with a wide grin under his yellow gaze.

James’s head is fuzzy from the pain. His arms are covered in cuts and scratches, purple blotches of bruises wherever he can see skin. He doesn’t really remember how things got this bad—it was supposed to be another standard patrol in those random Muggle neighborhoods. Obviously, there’s nothing standard about this at all.

“If you move, I’ll kill you,” Sirius says casually from above him, his elegant beauty fading into unfamiliar malice. “Do you understand that, James?”

James wants to hate him, wants to loathe him with every bone in his body and every ligament holding his muscles together and every vein carrying blood to his heart, but this is _Sirius_ he’s talking about—Sirius, who’s been his best mate for over ten years, whose skin is made of porcelain and ivory and steel fragments of starlight, who’s always, _always,_ been a self-sacrificing idiot for as long as he can remember—and he _can’t_ hate him.

He can’t, he can’t, he can’t.

-

“Why do you think he did it?”

“Who knows, McKinnon?” he says tiredly. “Maybe it was all a lie from the start, or maybe his mother has got something to do with it, or maybe he just changed his mind about who he is. Who bloody knows?”

Marlene shrinks back into herself and sips her butterbeer. “What if he’s—I dunno—faking it?” she asks, though she doesn’t sound like she believes it herself.

James laughs drily. “He let Evan Rosier torture my wife. He’s been at every Death Eater attack that’s happened and he’s almost killed you and Remus and Peter _so many_ times that I’ve lost count.” He looks at her flatly. “D’you really think there’s any chance he could be faking it?”

And Marlene glares at her cup with all the resentment of a bitter old woman, and leaves.

-

James wakes up at 3am on a Saturday because Sirius Black has decided _this_ is the best time for an explanation.

“You have two minutes to tell me what you’re doing here before I call the Aurors,” he says without missing a beat. He doesn’t look into Sirius’s eyes long enough to see if he even cares that this is what their relationship has been reduced to, but he knows that he does. He’s always known.

Sirius breathes out heavily, his robes smelling faintly like forest leaves and Muggle alcohol. He shifts uncomfortably. “I was thinking just a while ago,” he manages through short huffs. “And—I’ve done some things, Prongs—I can’t even—”

James gets the impression that Sirius is about to melt into a puddle of tears and drunken apologies, so he drags him to his living room, lays him down on a couch, and lets him sob quietly into his shoulder.

In the morning they can pretend it never happened.

-

“Maybe you were right,” he muses. “Maybe he’s faking it.”

Marlene, full to the brim and overflowing with anger and betrayal and unadulterated _longing_ , says, “Don’t be an idiot, Potter,” and probably doesn’t mean it.

-

James isn’t an idiot. He didn’t join the war effort without knowing what was at risk, the casualties it would bring, what he could lose and what he could gain. He knows the consequences of doing what he does.

But Sirius Black was never supposed to be one of them.

And even if he’s spying for the Order or he’s just trying to keep his mother from going through with whatever threat she might’ve made, or if he’s just lost and unsure about everything and teetering the line between coming back and staying with a family he hates—even _if,_ James knows that he’s lost Sirius in so many ways that it doesn’t really matter anymore.

In April 1981, James puts the photographs of Sirius away and tells himself that it’s okay to let go.


End file.
